Sabs' X-Files Season 10 Review!
Feb. 25th, 2016 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyImagine you have a mother, and you love her very much. Imagine there’s a zombie uprising and she gets bitten. For slow, excruciating hours, you try to convince yourself that maybe she’ll be okay, that the bite isn’t that bad, that this time it’s going to be different. But she turns into a ravenous zombie anyway, hungering for your brains. You can’t bring yourself to kill her, so you chain her up and lock her in the shed.
Occasionally you dare to open the shed door, hoping to see a glimpse of the woman you once loved. You never do.
Then, years later, you hear a noise in the shed. You think you hear your mother. You think she’s calling your name.
You run, breathless, and fling the door open. “Mom?” you whisper.
But she’s not your mother anymore.
This clumsy analogy, in a nutshell, is my relationship with the X-Files.
Do the math: I’m a 36-year-old nerd; obviously I was obsessed with the X-Files. My friends got me into it, and I used to watch it every Friday night with my (actual, non-allegorical-zombie) mother over popcorn and Kahlua—we even kept up that tradition long after I moved to Toronto. I cut my hair into a bob and dyed it red to look like Scully. (I already had the trenchcoat ‘cause goth.) Most significantly, the show happened at a pivotal time in the internet, and thus I met one of my favourite people in the known universe through a fan message board.
Actually, if it weren’t for the X-Files, I wouldn’t be here. Not metaphorically—I mean said friend was the person who introduced me to LJ. So I wouldn’t be here, writing this post.
We all watched it long after it sucked, hoping that the zombie would turn back into the thing we loved. It didn’t.
Accordingly, I did not want a reboot, because I remember the last few seasons. But okay. There was reboot. I figured I’d give it a chance. After all, what if I liked it? What if it rekindled my love for the show? It had been a huge part of my life!
And if worse came to worse, I could always hate-watch it, right? Plus I’ll watch Gillian Anderson in anything, let’s be honest.
Needless to say, if I had liked it, this post would be a lot shorter.
How much, you might ask, did I hate the reboot?
Not enough to do a screenshot recap of every episode (don’t think I wasn’t tempted) but so much that I watched the whole fucking thing so you don’t have to.
S10E01: My Struggle I
The second there was an opening monologue, I knew it would be bad. Did I know how bad? No, because I didn’t find out that the episode title was “My Struggle” until after I’d seen it.
Does no one on the production team speak German? I mean, I don’t speak German, but one thing I do know how to say in German is the title of this episode, and apparently no one spoke up and said, “hey, maybe we shouldn’t call it that.”
Anyway, there are a number of things that are terrible about this episode. Basically everything that is not Gillian Anderson is terrible. Gillian Anderson is a goddess who deserves to be in better TV shows, like The Fall and Hannibal. Why aren’t I watching those again?
The things I particularly hated about this episode:
• The hard shift to the lunatic right. The X-Files’ politics were inconsistent even at its best, but there was a certain cheeky anti-authoritarianism about them that resonated with me as a young anarchist. I think, to give them credit with the awkward references to mass surveillance, that they were aiming for that. Unfortunately, times have changed, and conspiracy theories are largely the provision of far-right white supremacists, and that’s where I’d say the politics—exemplified by Jeff Winger from Community, slumming it in this role—of this series now lie.
• The fucking baby. No one wanted a baby. No one thought, “you know what the X-Files is missing? A baby!” And yet there was a baby. They thoughtfully scrapped the baby at the end but now we’re going to have to hear about it for the next six episodes.
• The script. God, it was terrible. It was like someone fed every X-Files script into randomizing software and used the results shat out by the machine as dialogue. At one point, they were literally having a discussion that was all of the taglines from the original series.
• Mulder’s beard. And acting. I was generous and tried to convince myself that it was pretty good considering David Duchovny has apparently been dead for a decade and they had to resort to necromancy to squeeze this limited performance out of his pickled corpse, but no, it was still awful even for that.
But the winner of the Thing Sabotabby Loves to Hate About This Episode is:
The plot is basically that there is a powerful elite conspiring to take over America and then the world.
Think about that for a second.
THE GERMAN TRANSLATION OF "MY STRUGGLE" IS "MEIN KAMPF" ALSO THERE IS ALREADY A SMALL POWERFUL ELITE RUNNING AMERICA, WHY DO THEY NEED TO INVADE IT WITH JACKBOOTS?
S10E02: Founder’s Mutation
People kept saying that this episode was better but it was really only better because Mulder shaved. The rest of the episode was bad. There was more baby wangsting and they introduced a gay PoC character only to have him off himself before the credits. Also I’m already sick of hearing about the baby. Scully works a dangerous job and is a hugely religious Catholic; why would she have a baby out of wedlock on purpose?
Also the scary lab is called Nugenics. Get it?
Thing Sabotabby Loves To Hate About This Episode: “Unfortunate patients,” a.k.a. if you have a congenital abnormality of any sort you are a piteous thing of pity and can never lead a fulfilling life, ever. Here’s an article about Pitt-Hopkins syndrome.
S10E03: Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster
This is the one everyone kept saying was good. It was written by Darin Morgan, who was everyone’s favourite X-Files writer after Vince Gilligan. (I mean, there were some people who still preferred Morgan but clearly they are not Breaking Bad fans.)
It wasn’t that good, though. It was okay. The central concept—the were-monster isn’t a human that becomes an animal but an animal that becomes human—is pretty clever, and the bits with Rhys Darby were quite good. But it was still largely unfunny.
Also Scully got a dog, which was stupid because her last dog was eaten by a monster, so why would she put another innocent animal in danger? Fortunately, we never see the dog again.
Thing Sabotabby Loves To Hate About This Episode: You knew it was going to be the gratuitous transphobic joke that was in there for no reason, right?
S10E04: Home Again
This was actually my favourite episode, though I liked it better when it was called Flatline and had the Doctor in it.
But seriously, I enjoyed this. It was almost a really great episode—the A-plot was pretty cool, with a good anti-gentrification subtext, and the band-aid trash monster was ridiculous, which I liked.
My only real disappointment was the B-plot, with Scully’s mother dying. She was a pretty important character in the original and to not give her any lines and have her go out in such a stupid way, only caring about her son and grandson when it was clear that Scully was the only one of her kids to see her regularly, just made me hate everything. It could have been a really dark meditation on how women are taken for granted, even by other women, and viewed merely as receptacles for male heirs, but that would require more nuance than anyone on the writing staff can muster.
Thing Sabotabby Loves To Hate About This Episode: Margaret Scully dies and it’s still all about the fucking baby.
S10E05: Babylon
This was the worst thing ever. It starts with a young Muslim man praying a lot, then eating a sandwich, then blowing up an art gallery, because that’s what Muslims do. The sad thing is that it could have been delightfully subversive—all they needed to do was have the Muslim pray a lot and be stereotypical, then walk into wherever and get gunned down by a disgruntled white male mass shooter, as is statistically far more likely to happen in America.
But besides the Islamophobia—which is a pretty big aside—Mulder trips on LSD, only not really, and there are two new baby agents that are named Miller and Einstein, and Einstein is a terrible name for a character. Everyone is going to cringe whenever her name gets uttered, and it will be out of embarrassment for whoever thought that was a good idea. What is even the point of any of this?
Anyway they save the day, arrest all the terrorists who are planning to terrorize Texas or whatever, and then the next half of the episode is Mulder and Scully holding hands in a field talking about God and the importance of a mother’s love, and it’s the worst dialogue I have ever heard in my life and goes on forever.
Thing Sabotabby Loves To Hate About This Episode: A tie between the closing dialogue and the scene where the Cigarette Smoking Man whips a naked Mulder to the tune of Tom Waits’ “Misery Is the River of the World.” I didn’t imagine that last one, right? That actually happened. It’s even grosser when you remember that Mulder is the Cigarette Smoking Man’s son. It’s an indication of just how bad the closing dialogue was when it is tied for the worst thing about this episode with that.
S10E06: My Struggle II
Oh look, they wrote a sequel to Mein Kampf! And it’s about as right-wing, with a plot that revolves around CHEMTRAILS! and VACCINES! And it is the Worst. Thing. Ever, or at least the Worst. Thing. since the last episode.
It is irresponsible. It is bad TV but it is also irresponsible.
Because while I think the “fluoride is evil” conspiracy theory somewhat predates Dr. Strangelove, which was satirizing it, I also think that Dr. Strangelove unwittingly spread the notion that fluoride in the water supply was a bad thing. And this may have real-life consequences. (Not that I’m blaming the movie, or Kubrick, for that!)
Likewise, I think the X-Files got the idea of FEMA death camps from somewhere else, but definitely popularized it, to the point where a large number of people I know, in real life, believe that FEMA runs death camps.
The thing is, a lot of people are stupid. And stupid people pick up on fictional ideas as reality. Sometimes, like FEMA death camps, it can be pretty funny, but other times, like the anti-vax movement, it can be fatal.
The anti-vax movement has already murdered quite a lot of children. Do we really need to give them more encouragement, even in a TV show?
The entire episode felt like a goddamned Reddit thread. I mean, it also had poor plotting, shoddy characterization, and was so boring that during frantic race at the end I started tuning out and playing Zen Koi and all of a sudden there was a UFO only slightly more random than the one in the second season of Fargo. And of course the baby is key to it all. Of course it is.
Also, if the Cigarette Smoking Man's "face" is actually a mask and he has no nose, etc., why is the fake face all scarred up? Who, exactly, is he trying to fool? Why not give him a normal face to conceal the grossness beneath so that he can look in the mirror while plotting to take over the world that he already basically runs? But I was past caring by that point.
Thing Sabotabby Loves To Hate About This Episode: FUCKING EVERYTHING.
So that's it! Leave your outrage, reaction gifs, and fond memories of 90s X-Files fandom in the comments.
Occasionally you dare to open the shed door, hoping to see a glimpse of the woman you once loved. You never do.
Then, years later, you hear a noise in the shed. You think you hear your mother. You think she’s calling your name.
You run, breathless, and fling the door open. “Mom?” you whisper.
But she’s not your mother anymore.
This clumsy analogy, in a nutshell, is my relationship with the X-Files.
Do the math: I’m a 36-year-old nerd; obviously I was obsessed with the X-Files. My friends got me into it, and I used to watch it every Friday night with my (actual, non-allegorical-zombie) mother over popcorn and Kahlua—we even kept up that tradition long after I moved to Toronto. I cut my hair into a bob and dyed it red to look like Scully. (I already had the trenchcoat ‘cause goth.) Most significantly, the show happened at a pivotal time in the internet, and thus I met one of my favourite people in the known universe through a fan message board.
Actually, if it weren’t for the X-Files, I wouldn’t be here. Not metaphorically—I mean said friend was the person who introduced me to LJ. So I wouldn’t be here, writing this post.
We all watched it long after it sucked, hoping that the zombie would turn back into the thing we loved. It didn’t.
Accordingly, I did not want a reboot, because I remember the last few seasons. But okay. There was reboot. I figured I’d give it a chance. After all, what if I liked it? What if it rekindled my love for the show? It had been a huge part of my life!
And if worse came to worse, I could always hate-watch it, right? Plus I’ll watch Gillian Anderson in anything, let’s be honest.
Needless to say, if I had liked it, this post would be a lot shorter.
How much, you might ask, did I hate the reboot?
Not enough to do a screenshot recap of every episode (don’t think I wasn’t tempted) but so much that I watched the whole fucking thing so you don’t have to.
S10E01: My Struggle I
The second there was an opening monologue, I knew it would be bad. Did I know how bad? No, because I didn’t find out that the episode title was “My Struggle” until after I’d seen it.
Does no one on the production team speak German? I mean, I don’t speak German, but one thing I do know how to say in German is the title of this episode, and apparently no one spoke up and said, “hey, maybe we shouldn’t call it that.”
Anyway, there are a number of things that are terrible about this episode. Basically everything that is not Gillian Anderson is terrible. Gillian Anderson is a goddess who deserves to be in better TV shows, like The Fall and Hannibal. Why aren’t I watching those again?
The things I particularly hated about this episode:
• The hard shift to the lunatic right. The X-Files’ politics were inconsistent even at its best, but there was a certain cheeky anti-authoritarianism about them that resonated with me as a young anarchist. I think, to give them credit with the awkward references to mass surveillance, that they were aiming for that. Unfortunately, times have changed, and conspiracy theories are largely the provision of far-right white supremacists, and that’s where I’d say the politics—exemplified by Jeff Winger from Community, slumming it in this role—of this series now lie.
• The fucking baby. No one wanted a baby. No one thought, “you know what the X-Files is missing? A baby!” And yet there was a baby. They thoughtfully scrapped the baby at the end but now we’re going to have to hear about it for the next six episodes.
• The script. God, it was terrible. It was like someone fed every X-Files script into randomizing software and used the results shat out by the machine as dialogue. At one point, they were literally having a discussion that was all of the taglines from the original series.
• Mulder’s beard. And acting. I was generous and tried to convince myself that it was pretty good considering David Duchovny has apparently been dead for a decade and they had to resort to necromancy to squeeze this limited performance out of his pickled corpse, but no, it was still awful even for that.
But the winner of the Thing Sabotabby Loves to Hate About This Episode is:
The plot is basically that there is a powerful elite conspiring to take over America and then the world.
Think about that for a second.
THE GERMAN TRANSLATION OF "MY STRUGGLE" IS "MEIN KAMPF" ALSO THERE IS ALREADY A SMALL POWERFUL ELITE RUNNING AMERICA, WHY DO THEY NEED TO INVADE IT WITH JACKBOOTS?
S10E02: Founder’s Mutation
People kept saying that this episode was better but it was really only better because Mulder shaved. The rest of the episode was bad. There was more baby wangsting and they introduced a gay PoC character only to have him off himself before the credits. Also I’m already sick of hearing about the baby. Scully works a dangerous job and is a hugely religious Catholic; why would she have a baby out of wedlock on purpose?
Also the scary lab is called Nugenics. Get it?
Thing Sabotabby Loves To Hate About This Episode: “Unfortunate patients,” a.k.a. if you have a congenital abnormality of any sort you are a piteous thing of pity and can never lead a fulfilling life, ever. Here’s an article about Pitt-Hopkins syndrome.
S10E03: Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster
This is the one everyone kept saying was good. It was written by Darin Morgan, who was everyone’s favourite X-Files writer after Vince Gilligan. (I mean, there were some people who still preferred Morgan but clearly they are not Breaking Bad fans.)
It wasn’t that good, though. It was okay. The central concept—the were-monster isn’t a human that becomes an animal but an animal that becomes human—is pretty clever, and the bits with Rhys Darby were quite good. But it was still largely unfunny.
Also Scully got a dog, which was stupid because her last dog was eaten by a monster, so why would she put another innocent animal in danger? Fortunately, we never see the dog again.
Thing Sabotabby Loves To Hate About This Episode: You knew it was going to be the gratuitous transphobic joke that was in there for no reason, right?
S10E04: Home Again
This was actually my favourite episode, though I liked it better when it was called Flatline and had the Doctor in it.
But seriously, I enjoyed this. It was almost a really great episode—the A-plot was pretty cool, with a good anti-gentrification subtext, and the band-aid trash monster was ridiculous, which I liked.
My only real disappointment was the B-plot, with Scully’s mother dying. She was a pretty important character in the original and to not give her any lines and have her go out in such a stupid way, only caring about her son and grandson when it was clear that Scully was the only one of her kids to see her regularly, just made me hate everything. It could have been a really dark meditation on how women are taken for granted, even by other women, and viewed merely as receptacles for male heirs, but that would require more nuance than anyone on the writing staff can muster.
Thing Sabotabby Loves To Hate About This Episode: Margaret Scully dies and it’s still all about the fucking baby.
S10E05: Babylon
This was the worst thing ever. It starts with a young Muslim man praying a lot, then eating a sandwich, then blowing up an art gallery, because that’s what Muslims do. The sad thing is that it could have been delightfully subversive—all they needed to do was have the Muslim pray a lot and be stereotypical, then walk into wherever and get gunned down by a disgruntled white male mass shooter, as is statistically far more likely to happen in America.
But besides the Islamophobia—which is a pretty big aside—Mulder trips on LSD, only not really, and there are two new baby agents that are named Miller and Einstein, and Einstein is a terrible name for a character. Everyone is going to cringe whenever her name gets uttered, and it will be out of embarrassment for whoever thought that was a good idea. What is even the point of any of this?
Anyway they save the day, arrest all the terrorists who are planning to terrorize Texas or whatever, and then the next half of the episode is Mulder and Scully holding hands in a field talking about God and the importance of a mother’s love, and it’s the worst dialogue I have ever heard in my life and goes on forever.
Thing Sabotabby Loves To Hate About This Episode: A tie between the closing dialogue and the scene where the Cigarette Smoking Man whips a naked Mulder to the tune of Tom Waits’ “Misery Is the River of the World.” I didn’t imagine that last one, right? That actually happened. It’s even grosser when you remember that Mulder is the Cigarette Smoking Man’s son. It’s an indication of just how bad the closing dialogue was when it is tied for the worst thing about this episode with that.
S10E06: My Struggle II
Oh look, they wrote a sequel to Mein Kampf! And it’s about as right-wing, with a plot that revolves around CHEMTRAILS! and VACCINES! And it is the Worst. Thing. Ever, or at least the Worst. Thing. since the last episode.
It is irresponsible. It is bad TV but it is also irresponsible.
Because while I think the “fluoride is evil” conspiracy theory somewhat predates Dr. Strangelove, which was satirizing it, I also think that Dr. Strangelove unwittingly spread the notion that fluoride in the water supply was a bad thing. And this may have real-life consequences. (Not that I’m blaming the movie, or Kubrick, for that!)
Likewise, I think the X-Files got the idea of FEMA death camps from somewhere else, but definitely popularized it, to the point where a large number of people I know, in real life, believe that FEMA runs death camps.
The thing is, a lot of people are stupid. And stupid people pick up on fictional ideas as reality. Sometimes, like FEMA death camps, it can be pretty funny, but other times, like the anti-vax movement, it can be fatal.
The anti-vax movement has already murdered quite a lot of children. Do we really need to give them more encouragement, even in a TV show?
The entire episode felt like a goddamned Reddit thread. I mean, it also had poor plotting, shoddy characterization, and was so boring that during frantic race at the end I started tuning out and playing Zen Koi and all of a sudden there was a UFO only slightly more random than the one in the second season of Fargo. And of course the baby is key to it all. Of course it is.
Also, if the Cigarette Smoking Man's "face" is actually a mask and he has no nose, etc., why is the fake face all scarred up? Who, exactly, is he trying to fool? Why not give him a normal face to conceal the grossness beneath so that he can look in the mirror while plotting to take over the world that he already basically runs? But I was past caring by that point.
Thing Sabotabby Loves To Hate About This Episode: FUCKING EVERYTHING.
So that's it! Leave your outrage, reaction gifs, and fond memories of 90s X-Files fandom in the comments.
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no subject
Date: 2016-02-28 06:55 pm (UTC)Perhaps because at the time the dominant culture was safely in the hands of the right (my excursion into that stuff took place during the Tatcher/Reagan years) and since then the cultural ground has shifted (marriage equality was unthinkable at that point; as Tom Robinson put it, "the buggers are legal now, what more are they after?") and people need something to blame. Because obviously it can't be because their ideas are no longer acceptable...
no subject
Date: 2016-02-28 10:33 pm (UTC)